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If you’re going to annotate your photos, one of the likely reasons is to be able to share it. This is some of what I’ve discovered about sharing IPTC & GPS from various programs.
Before you get too excited about ACDSee Pro, it will show the co-ordinates entered by other software but has no mapping feature of its own.
All the software being discussed here shares GPS on JPG’s. So, if you add GPS using Yahoo Maps in Adobe Elements or Google Maps in Picasa, they will import to each other as well as to ACDSee Pro, XnView and MediaDex.
GPS can be added to TIFF’s in Picasa but it never leaves home, same as their captions don’t.
GPS added to TIFF’s in Adobe Elements will import to XnView but not Picasa.
MediaDex will not import GPS added to TIFF’s in either Adobe Elements or Picasa.
You cannot write GPS with ACDSee Pro or XnView.
GPS is an EXIF field, not IPTC.
So, that makes the options for TIFF’s pretty simple. It’s either Adobe Elements or Adobe Elements, and for printing to PDF, it’s either XnView or XnView.
IPTC also seems to be the most friendly between XnView and Adobe Elements, going in either direction although XnView has the most standard IPTC fields available. Adobe Elements will show some of the fields if they’re imported, but doesn’t have anywhere to enter or edit the information itself. It’s limited to keywords and captions in the Organizer and copyright and a couple of other lines in the Editor. IPTC-wise it’s a screwball setup and I can only guess the reason it staggers on from year to year without improvement is due to the time it would take to burn it to the ground and start over.
Writing IPTC to ACDSee Pro also instantly shows up in XnView. But not the other way around. ACDSee Pro will import IPTC instantly from MediaDex and vice versa.
Are you dizzy yet?
I still like ACDSee Pro best for printing options. If you’re willing to keep your captions under one line, and fore-go long notes, XnView is the other best bet for printing PDS’s with a long list of possible fields of information including GPS. It’s either GPS in XnView, or long captions in ACDSee Pro. Your choice.
XnView has some handy options for exporting IPTC info as a TXT file but it only works on JPG’s. Not handy at all if your files are TIFF’s. It can also copy JPG Comments into the IPTC Caption field if you feel like coming over to this side.
Better informed by my experiments but not any more efficient. Still using 5 graphics programs to cover basic photo filing.
Disclaimer: These results are based on out-dated versions of the three paid programs. I am using APSE 5.0 which has recently been upgraded to version 8.0, ACDSee Pro 2.5 which has recently been upgraded to version 3 and MediaDex which has become Canto Single User. Take a trial and see for yourself. If anything important has changed please drop a line here and let us know.
{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
Thanks for sharing your experience. Do you use Breezebrower at all for anything at the moment?
I had a 30-day trial of it a long time ago. I didn’t purchase it but I also don’t remember exactly how it went and, of course, I don’t know if I would be inspired by it nowadays. These things are always moving forward. I wish I had unlimited funds and endless hours. Are you recommending it?
Not really. It is just that I was reading Ken Watson’s page about this sort of thing and he seems to use it: http://www.rideau-info.com/photos/labelling.html
That’s a really old page. It might be updated or not, but the easiest thing is to go over to BreezeBrowser and have a look. It says it does handle TIFF’s and it’s recently added the option to add GPS using Google Earth. So, when I have time I will download a trial and see if I’m ready to trade in my patchwork method for just one. Of course, you could do the same.
The other one I really enjoyed is Photo Mechanic.
This is what I meant by getting yourself at the top of the heap and waiting for the others to catch up. It becomes a matter of what you can afford. BreezeBrowser is $69.95, so not terribly expensive and could be worth it to get past this other nonsense. As I recall I had some compatibility problems with it but it was back in the day before I changed all my PSD’s to TIFF’s. Photo Mechanic used to be about $150. It’s a beautiful piece of software. And also embeds GPS using Google Maps, it says.
I wish it wasn’t past midnight with a busy day coming up tomorrow.
I made a mistake when I said ACDSee Pro does not deal with GPS on TIFF’s. Now that I’ve added GPS co-ordinates using Photo Mechanic, I can see that it does. It shows up under EXIF, completely intact and can also be printed with photos. However, there’s no way that I know of to add GPS using ACDSee Pro.